When nature gets angry, it tends to take it out on the nicest people. To our "broken society" of road rage, drugs, and flick knives it threatens little more than a slow crumbling of the coastline and a gradually warming climate. It is on close-knit, peace-loving, God-fearing communities like that of the Samoans that it likes to vent its full fury. It is, admittedly, more than 40 years since I visited Samoa (then called Western Samoa), when I was in a group of Rome-based journalists who in November 1970 accompanied Pope Paul VI on an eastern pilgrimage which took him to seven countries in 10 days, with Samoa as his most easterly stopping point. Samoa was paradise compared to the sweltering mayhem of the Philippines. The pope was greeted at the country's little airport by a group of portly Samoan gentlemen, formally dressed for the occasion in coats and skirts. Then he was driven in a motorcade along a route spanned by floral arches and flanked by those extraordinary Samoan houses, known as fales, which have no walls and consist of nothing but thatched roofs supported by poles.

The fales told us a lot about the Samoans: how tidily they kept their homes and how there could have been no fear of crime, and no secrets to hide, among people who exposed themselves and their belongings to constant public view. The Samoans' community spirit and trust in each other are legendary, and they must also have trusted equally in the benevolence of the weather to build themselves houses without walls. The tsunami will have cruelly shattered that trust.

It was the weather that in 1890 brought Robert Louis Stevenson to Samoa. The famous Scotsman, with his chronic lung disease, was always in search of a climate that would restore him to health. And in Samoa he found not only that but a society that he grew to love. He adopted the native name of Tusitala, meaning "storyteller", and when he died suddenly of a stroke in 1894 at the age of 44, was borne by his Samoan admirers on their shoulders to the top of a nearby mountain and buried by them on a spot overlooking the sea. There on his tomb are the words of his famous "Requiem", which ends "Home is the sailor, home from the sea,/ And the hunter home from the hill." Unlike the poor Samoans, he at least remains safe from any tsunami.

My sister falls foul of Ryanair

My sister telephones from Pisa, where she has just arrived with her husband from Glasgow. She is in high dudgeon about the way she has been treated at Prestwick airport. My sister is in her 70s, and her husband in his 80s, and neither is in tip-top physical condition. A few years ago she lost some of her fingers in a motor accident, and he has been lame since childhood and can get around airports only in a wheelchair.

The young man pushing my brother-in-law's wheelchair towards the departure gate suddenly noticed that my sister, trudging along behind, was not only carrying her laptop computer but also had, slung around her neck, a pouch which, she told him, contained her wallet, passport, and a paperback. This was against Ryanair's policy of only one item of hand luggage per passenger, he said firmly, and she would not be allowed to board the plane.

She explained that it was only her shortage of fingers that made it convenient to keep her possessions separate in this way, and pointed out that the single items of luggage carried by other passengers were often far more capacious than her two items combined. But the young man said that, unless she disposed of her neck pouch, he'd report her to the authorities. So she caved in and squeezed the pouch and its contents into her husband's and her own other bags.

Particularly interesting is the reason he gave for refusing, in my finger- challenged sister's case, to bend Ryanair's rule. To make an exception of her, he said, would have meant "discriminating against people who aren't disabled". The plight of the able-bodied is not widely appreciated: they arouse little compassion or sympathy for their lot. But they seem to have a champion at last.

Don't stint on the waiter's tip

I don't know what's happened to the anti-tipping movement in this country, but I remember many years ago how a Guardian reporter was given the dreadful assignment of spending a day in London restaurants and taxis with instructions to give no tips. Instead, he had to hand out little printed cards explaining that tipping was offensive to human dignity. The reporter was treated on each occasion to the most extravagant abuse.

We have since become reconciled to the inevitability of tipping, but been too often victims of a scam by which some restaurant owners have kept the money and used it to top up the pittance they pay staff to reach the minimum wage. Since yesterday, this deceitful practice has been outlawed. It is to be hoped – though it is not stipulated in law – that tips will now be given to the waiters for whom customers have always intended them. This is as it should be, but waiters will no longer be indifferent to the size of the tips; there is a danger that some may turn nasty if these fail to meet their expectations.